My friends are to blame for a lot of things. I only joined Facebook after persistent poking and now I find myself in the same situation with Twitter.

There are many uses for Twitter, including mini blogging, updating people of your journeys or even worse, your choice of breakfast consumption. Yes Twitter is diverse and it allows you to post fairly short sentences for all to see. You follow other Twitters and others can follow you and even reply to your waffling moments of genius, humour or sheer randomness.

So now I twitter along with a few friends and a network of fellow short conversationalists, but it is the integration that fascinates me.

First off, I don’t need to be using the official website to keep adding content. Twitter provides mobile phone txting support for those of us on the move who wish to update their audience, but with free applications and plugins for both Windows and Mac, you can go that extra mile and extend your reach that little bit further.

Next I wanted to integrate Twitter into my blog sidebar. Twitter has flash and java versions for you to choose from and so I didn’t risk upsetting my blog style, I decided the java was the way to go, although I wish I could hide my replies!

With decisively concise Twitter messages appearing, the next obvious implementation was then to discover a method of changing the Windows Live Messenger status and Skype mood automatically using the submissions as I update Twitter. Happily, there are already applications that help here such as Twessenger for Windows Live Messenger (MSN) and Twype for Skype.

Last but not least was to find a nice desktop solution for monitoring and submitting Twitters. Snitter is a very nicely presented application that allows just that, with notifications of new Twitters, replies and direct messages. It has a diverse set of colour schemes to choose from, so don’t let the green version in the screenshot on their website put you off as others such as the blue (pictured above) are far more pleasing to my eyes anyway.

Update 29/08/2008: I now use Twhirl, which is very similar to Snitter, however has a lot more features.

Personally, Twittering will provide me with the opportunity to post short snippets of news about gaming, technology and personal interests. More importantly though, there are so many tools to choose from and features to divulge your time in, Twitter can be more than just a random message board, but an opening into keeping in touch with fellow like-minded individuals.

James Woodcock

Freelance Journalist, Author, Blogger & Podcaster specialising in gaming and technology.
Ever since he experienced the first controllable pixel movement on the television screen, he has been entranced by the possibilities and rewarding entertainment value generated from these metal and plastic boxes of delight. Writing hundreds of articles including commentary and reviews on various gaming platforms, while also interviewing well known industry figures for popular online publications.